Another day, another country. Wednesday was a day of driving, it was over 200 miles from Liepaja where we spent the night at another Statoil garage (free wifi, morning coffee and a bit of security – not sure if we would get away with it if our van wasn’t so small but that just another perk of living in the caddy) to Vilnius in Lithuania and the journey wasn’t too exciting so we had to stick one of Liam’s (very varied) playlists on and sing the time away.
No checkpoint at the border so we sped through and worked our was down to Vilnius City Camp (stopping off at a Maxima supermarket on the way for essentials like cheese and pastries). The camp here is slightly further out of the city, you have to hop on the bus to get in rather than walk like we’ve been doing recently, but it’s much nicer. We’ve only been paying €13 a night since we’re in a car and not a camper and that includes wifi, showers, toilets, kitchen facilities (kettle, score!) and electricity. Or it would include electric, if we had been clever enough to being an EU adaptor with us, imagine our surprise when our three prong plug wouldn’t fit in the two prong hole – but never mind, we’re just using the sockets in the kitchen instead – ever the problem solvers. Back to the campsite, it’s a grass site which is a step up from our friend concrete, and there’s staff that live on site so it seems fairly safe.
Last night we even managed to wash our bedding!! Finally, after being in the van over two months we had that lovely fresh bedding feeling – i’ve never appreciated a washing machine quite so much.
This morning we up, showered and enjoyed a brew which we didn’t have to use our gas to make then headed to the bus stop. Like I said, the camp is too far out of the city to walk so we used our first Baltic public transport, pleasantly surprised! We caught the number 16 electric bus from the stop nearest to the camp (under 10 mins walk), asked the friendly lady bus driver for two tickets, parted with the princely sum of €1 each and away we went. The bus took us right into the city and stopped at the train station, from there it’s only about a 5 min walk into the old town.
(the caddy camper motto)
Vilnius is much like the other Baltic cities we’ve seen – we start off feeling a bit edgy and checking the rucksack was zipped up every 2 seconds to really enjoying the feel of the place and having a great time. I think Vilnius may be the poorest city we’ve visited, the people (on the whole) look like they’ve had a hell of a paper round and i’m pretty sure we walked past a very dolled up ‘lady of the night’ at 10am this morning. On the way in we noticed lots of older people, mainly women, selling jars of hand picked mushrooms and other veg along the side of the road which made the place look untidy but I can’t begin to think of how cheap it must have been!
After we spend a good few hours there we’ve changed our minds completely, it’s a lovely city and it’s roughness only adds to its charm. We didn’t see any police standing around like we did in Riga but we never felt unsafe, even though there seemed to be far fewer tourists in Vilnius.
We followed the walking route marked out in the official map of the city so we saw the most important sights such as the Dawn Gate, Presidential Palace and the peaceful Bernadine Gardens, we also walked up to the top of Castle Hill and got a great view of the city and a nice breeze to go along with it.
There are two ghettos in the city which are worth a look round too, we opted for the ‘small ghetto’ which is where the Jewish people were confined too during the Nazi occupation. There are electric info signs telling you all about that time, it’s just awful and I had no idea that the Jewish population was being persecuted all the way over in Lithuania – the things you don’t learn at school! At the end of the occupation there were only around 2,500 Jews left in Vilnius, from a population of over 58,000. Just awful.
We even popped in to the republic of Uzupis – where you must smile, be arty and NOT drive your car into the river, the signs say so.
We did veer off the path slightly to treat ourselves to a bite of lunch at a restaurant called Jurgis ir Drakonas (very highly recommended on trip advisor) which was possibly our favourite part of the day – we’re not saying the city wasn’t impressive, we just REALLY love food. Liam had a huge ‘Chefs Special’ pizza which he tells me may have been one of the best pizzas he has ever eaten while I went for the pulled pork shepherds pie – absolutely delicious. Altogether with drinks (Lithuanian beer & home made lemonade) the bill was all of £13 so our budget is safe for the moment. It was a bit strange experiencing the Baltic service for the first time though – certainly no service with a smile, our waiter was brusque as best but we enjoyed it all the same.
After lunch we tried our best to carry on sight-seeing but feeling the beginnings of a food-come coming on we decided to catch the bus back to camp, which we managed to do after a fair amount of confusion over where we actually caught the bus from – tip, it’s exactly the same place as you got off, not where it is signposted to stop. Back at the campsite now getting everything charged up and ready for our next journey. We even cracked into the emergency noodles for tea…
tiny van adventures 